The Blog of Scott AaronsonIf you take just one piece of information from this blog:Quantum computers would not solve hard search problemsinstantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once.

It’s (just-barely) conceivable that the results could have been slightly skewed by the quantum- and complexity-loving readership of this blog.

Voters really didn’t like fiction/pop-culture references, mechanical contrivances, or anything that sounded like a publicity stunt. They were much keener on conceptual advances (even to the extent of putting Gödel well ahead of the transistor).

I need to catch a plane to give the Buhl Lecture at Carnegie Mellon tomorrow, so I’ll leave you to draw any further conclusions.

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25 Responses to “CS timeline voting: the results are in!”

Dear Scott: I wish you had trumpeted tomorrow’s lecture at CMU a bit earlier! I live in Des Moines and am going to have to drive most of the night to make it on time…I only hope I’m not too punch drunk from lack of sleep to appreciate the show. Well, got to go gas up the VW and buy some munchies. See you in Pittsburgh!

Another anomaly, in my opinion, is the high position of Euclid’s Elements, as compared to the more algorithmic problem solving oreiented work of Diophantes, Aryabhata, and Al-Khwarizmi for example. Although Euclid founded the “theorem-proof” structure of mathematics, CS in my opinion owes more to the idea of a “mechanical algorithm’ which should not require any “intelligence” to use. Looked this way, I think the development of decimal arithmetic, and general algebraic procedures for the solution of equations is probably much more important in the history of CS.

Oh, I feel silly. That’s easy to determine. The 150 mark falls “between” machine translation and Usenet. Except it actually can’t, since they have the same number of votes (-1). So more properly, the 149 mark falls between Egyptian revolution and machine translation/Usenet, and the 151 mark falls between machine translation/Usenet and Akamai, and it’s up to Scott whether he prefers to include machine translation or Usenet for #150…

This is an absurdly academic list! Euclid’s Elements #1? And how is Konrad Suze, inventor of the world’s first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, not on this list?? Please try again, this is an obvious fail!

How much of a bias was there to Euclid’s Elements by merit of it being at the top of the chronological list? When I saw the page I started voting, but almost stopped (or at least started going much more quickly) once I saw how long the list was

Zuse’s Z1 was not a Turing-complete computer, it was program-controlled, but did only execute straight-line programs without any control structures. The program also was not stored in memory, but fed to the machine on hole-punched film rolls.

Euclid probably enjoyed a little of an unfair advantage since the poll was sorted by time. A better poll would have been randomly sorted differently for every user (though I admit that would’ve have been so much fun). I myself gave Euclid an upvote when I first started, but then later went back and switched it to a downvote (this was before we could cancel a vote) after seeing what kind of stuff it was up against.

If I were Scott, I would throw out the Fischer-Lynch-Patterson theorem (because of the obvious bias towards theory of the poll participants) and stick in both Machine Translation and Usenet. Mike, Nancy, Mike, if you’re reading this, please accept my apologies — I still think it’s a wonderful result.